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Oracle: Big Data – see more, act faster

Every business needs to harness the power of Big Data to add value, increase profitability and exploit new and lucrative markets. Although the principle may be widely accepted by most enterprises, only a few of these businesses actually understand why Big Data mining is so important and even fewer comprehend the competitive advantages that can be gained from analytics. That’s the view of Xavier Verhaegue, Vice President of Emerging Technologies and Security Solutions at Oracle Europe, Middle East and Africa. Speaking at Whitehall Media’s Big Data Analytics Conference in London earlier this year, Mr Verhaegue explained that his company was developing systems and solutions which were capable of helping all business, regardless of size, to understand the importance of the huge amounts of data that businesses can now harvest, and to use architecture and systems that would enable them to act on the insights this data gives and use this knowledge to see more and act faster.As an illustration Mr Verhaegue highlighted the examples of the pharmaceutical and financial services industries which were using Oracle technology in order to reduce costs and make their targeted marketing more effective. Research and development within the pharma industry can be prohibitively expensive. However, by using the wide spectrum of patient data available and applying analytic principles, these companies have been able to produce much more targeted marketing and significantly reduce the cost of clinical drug trials. In the financial services industry clients had been able to harvest Big Data more effectively using Oracle’s integrated solutions stack and produce not only better and more-targeted financial marketing materials, but had also discovered that they could use this same information to increase the levels of fraud protection using highly focused customer profiles. The results have led to significant savings for both industries.

Effective marketing is wholly reliant on having the relevant and up-to-date information. The internet and the rise of the digital culture have made vast amounts of additional information available to all businesses. Few however have known where to look for this information before, and what to do with the information once they got it. This has been compounded to some extent by the fear felt by some enterprises that the use of private and confidential information would alienate their customers. However, as Oracle points out, the latest research would suggest that most consumers are prepared and willing to surrender some of their private and personal information if it results in more relevant and targeted advertising. Both the so-called Y Generation and the rest of the working population hate advertising in general. However studies have shown that they will accept advertising and the harvesting of social media and geo-location data as long as it results in relevant marketing, in other words real-time information and appropriate recommendations for customers.

The need to ensure that this relevant information is available immediately and on demand is now defining business architecture and structures. With Oracle’s help, many companies are now able to put systems in place which connect corporate practice and expectations to the available information. Oracle has developed a simple set of analytics and integration tools to facilitate this process. Working in conjunction with Cloudera and Hadoop, Oracle has developed a solutions stack which helps businesses to acquire Big Data information, organise and analyse it and then decide how best to use the information to best effect.